The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices, etc.
With many cloud systems today, it is possible for users to create an “image” (e.g., for a virtual machine instance or the like) that extends a base image with additional files or updates as modified by the user. While this technique has many advantages, one disadvantage is that it can be very difficult for users who provision particular images to understand the differences between those images.